Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas was born on January 25, 1225, at the castle of the counts of Aquino, a fortress at Roccasecca between Rome and Naples ^[1]. His father, Landulf of Aquino, belonged to the lesser nobility of the region, and the family held ties to both the imperial court of Frederick II and the great Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino nearby ^[2]. As a younger son, Thomas was marked early for a church career.

At around the age of five he was sent to Monte Cassino as an oblate, where his relatives hoped he might one day become abbot, a position that would have brought the family prestige and influence ^[1]. When warfare between the emperor and the papacy disrupted life at the abbey in 1239, the boy moved to the newly founded university at Naples. There he encountered two forces that determined the rest of his life: the writings of Aristotle, only recently translated into Latin in full, and the Dominican Order, a community of mendicant friars devoted to preaching and study ^[2].

Any biography of Thomas Aquinas has to reckon with his family's fierce opposition to his Dominican vocation. Joining a begging order struck his relatives as a social disgrace, and when he took the habit around 1244 his brothers seized him on the road and confined him at the family castle for roughly a year ^[3]. Thomas refused to yield. He spent the confinement reading Scripture and the Sentences of Peter Lombard, and his family eventually let him return to the friars ^[1].

Once free, the young friar was sent north for formation. He studied at Paris and then at Cologne under Albert the Great, the most learned Dominican of the age and an early champion of Aristotle's natural philosophy ^[2]. According to a story reported by his early biographers, fellow students mocked the large, quiet southerner as a dumb ox, and Albert replied that the ox's bellowing would one day fill the world ^[3].

Thomas returned to Paris in 1252 to lecture on the Sentences, the standard theological textbook, and in 1256 he became a master of theology at the University of Paris ^[1]. His appointment came amid bitter resistance from secular clergy who resented the rapid rise of the mendicant orders within the university. He defended the friars' right to teach in polemical works and held one of the Dominican chairs of theology ^[4].

Over the following two decades he moved repeatedly at the direction of his order and the papal court: Paris, Orvieto, Rome, Viterbo, Paris again, and finally Naples. Wherever he went, he taught, disputed publicly, and dictated to a team of secretaries. His output was enormous. Modern editors count commentaries on Scripture and on Aristotle, disputed questions, sermons, hymns, and the two great syntheses for which he is best known ^[4].

The question of who was Thomas Aquinas is answered above all by his books. The Summa contra Gentiles, composed in the 1260s, presented Christian claims in a form addressed to readers who did not accept scriptural authority, arguing from reason as far as reason could go ^[4]. The Summa Theologiae, begun around 1266 and left unfinished at his death, organized the whole of theology into a structured sequence of questions and articles: God, creation, human nature, morality, Christ, and the sacraments ^[1].

Among Thomas Aquinas achievements, the most consequential was his demonstration that Aristotle's philosophy, viewed with suspicion by many churchmen, could serve Christian theology rather than threaten it. He distinguished carefully between truths available to natural reason, such as the existence of God, and truths known only through revelation, such as the Trinity, and he insisted the two could never genuinely contradict each other ^[5]. His five ways, five arguments for God's existence drawn from motion, causation, contingency, degrees of perfection, and order in nature, remain among the most discussed passages in the history of philosophy ^[5].

His moral thought proved equally durable. Building on Aristotle's ethics, he developed an account of natural law, the idea that human reason can discern basic principles of right action from the inclinations of human nature itself. That framework shaped later Catholic moral teaching and influenced Western legal and political theory well beyond the church ^[6]. He also composed liturgical texts for the feast of Corpus Christi at the request of Pope Urban IV, and hymns attributed to him, including the Pange Lingua, are still sung ^[2].

Contemporaries describe a man of unusual physical size, deep concentration, and personal simplicity. He took the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience as a Dominican and appears to have lived them without drama, declining ecclesiastical honors, including, according to early accounts, the archbishopric of Naples ^[3].

His working habits were legendary. Witnesses at his canonization inquiry recalled that he could dictate to several secretaries on different topics and that he became so absorbed in thought he lost awareness of his surroundings. One famous anecdote places him at the table of King Louis IX of France, suddenly striking the table upon solving an argument against the Manichaeans, oblivious to the royal company ^[3].

For all his intellectual force, the sources present him as devout before he was scholarly. He prayed before writing, celebrated Mass daily, and treated theology as an act of devotion as much as analysis. In December 1273, while celebrating Mass in Naples, he underwent an experience he never explained, after which he stopped writing altogether. To his companion Reginald of Piperno he reportedly said that everything he had written seemed like straw compared with what he had seen ^[1].

The final phase of his career unfolded in Naples, where the Dominicans sent him in 1272 to establish a house of studies. He continued lecturing and working on the third part of the Summa Theologiae, treating the life of Christ and the sacraments, until the experience of December 1273 ended his literary activity ^[4].

Early in 1274 Pope Gregory X summoned him to the Second Council of Lyon, called to negotiate reunion between the Latin and Greek churches. Though his health was failing, Thomas set out on the journey north. On the road he struck his head against a fallen branch and grew progressively weaker ^[2].

He stopped first at the castle of his niece and then asked to be taken to the Cistercian abbey of Fossanova, saying he preferred to die in a religious house. There, after several weeks of decline, he died on March 7, 1274, at the age of forty nine ^[1]. The monks kept his body, which later became the object of a long dispute before his remains were transferred to the Dominican church in Toulouse in 1369 ^[2].

The years immediately after his death were turbulent for his reputation. In 1277 the bishop of Paris condemned a list of philosophical propositions, some of which touched positions associated with Thomas, and debate over his orthodoxy continued for decades ^[5]. The tide turned decisively when Pope John XXII canonized him in 1323, and in 1567 Pope Pius V named him a Doctor of the Church ^[1].

His long afterlife is one of the notable Thomas Aquinas facts: few medieval thinkers have been so persistently revived. The Council of Trent drew on his theology in the sixteenth century, and in 1879 Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Aeterni Patris made the study of his thought central to Catholic education, launching the modern movement known as Thomism ^[6]. The critical Leonine edition of his works, begun under the same pope, continues to this day.

Beyond the church, philosophers of many convictions still engage his arguments on causation, human action, law, and the relationship between reason and belief. Universities, schools, and learned societies around the world carry his name, and the Summa Theologiae is read in philosophy departments as well as seminaries ^[5]. He is honored as the patron saint of students and academics, with a feast day now kept on January 28 ^[2].